Calluna

We upgraded to a Blu-ray player this weekend. First, let me say, that I don’t care at all about Blu-ray or improved video quality, and I don’t like that Blu-ray discs are twice as expensive as DVDs. But we didn’t buy it for that reason and hubby assures me that we will not buy Blu-ray discs now just because we can. We bought the Blu-ray for streaming, Netflix streaming that is. And wow, I love it!

The player easily connected with our wireless network. I pulled up Netflix on the laptop and began adding fliks to our “watch now” queue and they instantly appeared on the TV. We were quite impressed with how easy it was to set up and add and watch movies. We’ve only watched two movies on it so far. On the second one the audio wasn’t quite synced right with the video (I reported this to Netflix, by the way).

Reasons why Netflix streaming is awesome:

• It’s free for Netflix members, which we are
• We can watch movies without waiting on the DVD
• I don’t have to pay $4.99 to buy a movie on the satellite just because we don’t have any new Netflix DVDs yet
• I will probably cut back on the # of DVDs I get from Netflix at one time, thus saving me money! (i.e. take my 3-DVDs-at-a-time plan down to 2, or something)

For those of you totally green with envy right now and feeling like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (“I want it NOW!”) but you don’t want to spend the money on a Blu-ray player, you don’t have to. Netflix sells a box just for streaming for $99. You can also stream with the Xbox360. If you have a Blu-ray player (only certain brands do it) and no Netflix, sign up for their 1 DVD at a time, unlimited number of DVDs a month, plan for $8.99 and stream as much as you want — for less than the cost of 2 movies from satellite or the movie store.